Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem: review

‘Paranoia,” says Perkus Tooth, the hero of Jonathan Lethem’s eighth novel, “is a flower in the brain”. It’s a lovely image for the comfort that conspiracy theorists derive from their skew-whiff certitudes. Who hasn’t sometimes wanted to believe that the ills of the world are caused by the machinations of the secretly powerful rather than by stupidity and laziness? Perkus devotes his life to the parodic detective work of the chronically paranoid. You will have remembered this if you have read the short story that Lethem wrote about him for Zadie Smith’s collection, The Book of Other People.

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

A semi-recluse resembling a “bit player from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, he was once a columnist for Rolling Stone and now spends his days in his Manhattan apartment, scrutinising old movies and obscure albums in the belief that they hold clues to ways of defeating the mysterious authorities who control our lives. The Scully to Perkus’s Mulder, the Watson to his Holmes who sees but does not observe the truth, is the novel’s narrator, a “Manhattan gadabout” called Chase Insteadman. Perkus tries to convince Chase that their lives are being manipulated by unseen forces; Chase wonders how to save Perkus from complete insanity.

And yet it is usually the role of the paranoiac in films or books to turn out to be spot on after all, and as the novel progresses there are hints that Perkus is right to think that there are nefarious conspiracies afoot. Somebody seems to be engineering inexplicable phenomena to distract the populace from more serious concerns: a permanent fog over the financial district, snow in August, a strange chocolate smell pervading the city.

Buildings collapse for no reason, giant holes that are apparently art installations spring up in the streets and people topple into them. Then there is the creature spotted roaming the streets: is it an escaped tiger as the authorities claim, or is it a sentient mechanical digger driven mad by loneliness and destroying buildings at random?

Lethem’s most admired novels have been set in Brooklyn, where he grew up, and in these Manhattan is somewhere to aspire to live in and be slightly suspicious of. It is interesting that, in setting a novel in the borough, he has presented us with this surreal alternative version.

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He has found a new way to make the point that Manhattanites are shallow and self-obsessed. The citizens are complicit in fooling themselves; they refuse to take any notice of the evidence that they are living in what Perkus calls a “simulacrum”, burying themselves instead in the sappy human-interest stories that have replaced world news in the new “war-free” New York Times. One can interpret the novel as a morality tale warning us to be eternally vigilant of our rulers and betters, and at a stretch draw parallels between the ignorance of these Manhattanites and the way that the city in real life feted the financiers who ultimately caused the credit crunch.

But it is a little too Perkus-Toothian to strain after subtexts and thematic unity in Lethem’s work. His novels are loose baggy monsters to be cherished for their quirky comic conceits, nervily flashy sentences and superb intellectual one-liners (“I don’t care what anyone says, Ballard’s just Baudrillard without the u-d-r-i”).

Although not every idea comes off and the novel lacks some of the emotional power of his Motherless Brooklyn, one comes to take real pleasure in the company of these narcissistic weirdos. But if Lethem’s Manhattan had the life and resonance of his Brooklyn, reading this book would have you waking up in the middle of the night fretting that just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that a sentient mechanical digger might not be out to get you. It doesn’t quite.